I have always loved learning. I have always loved words and stories -- from being read to, then learning to read and write, then to writing my own stories, to reading and writing texts of increasing levels of difficulty. It was a joy. Language learning was always easy for me, but through a lifetime of learning and over forty years of teaching I have learned that it is not always easy for everyone, even the brightest of students. My goal is to enable my students, at what ever level, to reach a level of mastery such that they are no longer struggling to read, but reading to learn and finding joy in it.

The same can be said of my teaching foreign languages. My goal is to enable my students to reach increasing levels of competence in understanding, speaking, reading another language, so that the experience is one of joy rather than struggle.
In high school, I began learning Spanish. In college, I added French. I completed a BSE in Spanish and French from Kansas State Teachers College, Emporia in 1963. From there I went to the University of Washington, where I began teaching Spanish to
undergraduates and completed a Masters Degree In Language and Language Learning in 1965. This degree included a lot of coursework in linguistics, psychology and education as well as Spanish.


My education and teaching continued at the University of Texas at Austin, where I completed a PhD in Romance Languages (Spanish) in 1972. I continued teaching undergraduates in basic language courses.

From 1972 through 1983 I taught as an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia and then as an Associate Professor at the University of Tulsa. In those years I taught both language and literature classes to undergraduate and graduate students.

In 1983 I made a career change, completing a Masters in Social Work from the University of Kansas in 1985. My career in social work has been mostly in hospital, home health and hospice settings In all those settings I had the opportunity to conduct patient and family support groups and to provide patient and family education about adjustment to illness, grief and loss.

After my retirement, I have returned to helping students improve their reading skills or their English language skills. I have served as a volunteer tutor with Kansas City Literacy, helping adults struggling with reading. Through my church, I was a volunteer reading tutor with a group of third graders at a local elementary school. While living for five years in my hometown in central Kansas, I was a volunteer teaching aide in an ESL class at a local community college (adult learners).

With this varied experiences I can help many different students improve their language skills in English or Spanish.